KENNEDY SPACE CENTER — Intuitive Machines confirmed Friday that its Nova-C lunar lander named Athena is dead after it landed inside a moon crater, 250 meters from its intended landing site in the Mons Mouton region of the lunar south pole.

The company said the mission has concluded, and teams will continue to assess the data collected throughout the mission.

SpaceX launched the IM-2 lunar lander on its Falcon 9 rocket on Feb. 26. Nearly eight days later, the 14-foot (4.3-meter) tall Nova-C lunar lander autonomously touched down at 12:32 p.m. ET on the moon’s surface.

“Athena is on the surface on the moon,” said Josh Marshal, communications director at Intuitive Machines, in NASA’s live feed of the mission.

However, the IM-2 and NASA could not determine its position and the health of the vehicle at the time of the landing.

Once they retrieved information from the lander, officials said images from Athena on the lunar surface confirmed that the machine was on its side.

Intuitive Machines said mission controllers were able to accelerate several program and payload milestones, including NASA’s PRIME-1 suite, before the lander’s batteries depleted.

However, due to the direction of the sun, the orientation of the solar panels, and extreme cold temperatures in the crater, they do not expect Athena to recharge — ending the mission.

IM-2 said this was the southernmost lunar landing and surface operations ever achieved.

They said the area has been avoided due to its rugged terrain, and the company believes the insights and achievements from IM-2 will open the region for further space exploration. 

Intuitive Machines ran into a nearly similar problem when its IM-1 lunar lander touched down on the moon last year.

As it was coming in for a landing, one of the craft’s legs dug into the lunar soil and it snapped off, thus tipping that Nova-C over.

However, that lunar lander, named Odysseus, was able to deploy and get data from NASA and some of its commercial payloads.